If you thought USians were stupid already, give it a few more years of AI usage! You can just see people’s eyes glassing over when you try to discuss anything of import.

Yuuuup. I’m an American, and I’m particularly scared for Gen Alpha. The amount of times I’ve seen my nieces and nephews stop mid-sentence, pull out their phone and have ChatGPT complete their thought is… Idk man. I’m a millennial, and a significant part of this is my generation’s fault, cuz we’re the “hand them an iPad so they’ll leave you alone” parents (though not me personally because I have zero interest in bearing any crotchfruit). But damn, it’s scary. And sad.

I do like videogames, including ones with NPCs, but the difference there is that an NPC isn’t pretending to be a person, it’s pretending to be a character in a fiction that was definitively written by a person. And even so, I very much don’t like hyper-realism in games, much prefer stylized and/or cartoony.

And yeah the fake person at a drive thru thing started up where I am in California sometime last year (or at least that I first noticed). The irritatingly realistic voice is bad enough, but it’s really the obsequious responses that bug me there. A lot of, “great choice! The orange chicken is really tasty”, like bitch you literally don’t have a mouth, please stop.

Yeah but see that freaks me tf out too. A few nights ago, the moon was shining through the leaves of the oak tree in my backyard in such a way that it vaguely looked like a little kid’s face, and I literally said out loud “absolutely not” and went back inside.

Hanged. Ain’t no way this textbook case of overcompensating masculine fragility is hung, lbr.

+1 for GrapheneOS. I wasn’t particularly privacy conscious when I installed it; I was just super bothered by the Google/Apple duopoly in mobile OSes and wanted literally anything else. Came across GrapheneOS and a few others, but Graphene looked the easiest to install (and it was!) so I went with that. Barely a year later, Google’s out here trying to lock Android down and harvest literally every piece of personal data they can find, and I feel like I dodged a bullet.